The Best Free SEO Tools in 2026

Paid SEO tools are good. Free SEO tools, used correctly, can be just as effective for most of what the average team needs. Here are the best free SEO tools available in 2026, organised by what they actually do.

SEO crawlers

A crawler is the foundation of any technical SEO workflow. It maps your entire site, records every response code, and flags issues automatically. Without one, you are guessing.

Crawly (Mac, free, unlimited)

Crawly is a free native macOS SEO spider with no page limit and no subscription. It crawls any site and surfaces 19 issue types: broken pages, redirect chains, missing and duplicate titles, H1s and meta descriptions, non-indexable pages, missing alt text, security header issues, hreflang errors, and more.

What separates Crawly from other free crawlers is the built-in Claude Code MCP integration. Connect it to Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex and ask questions about your crawl data in plain English. Instead of filtering spreadsheets, you describe what you want and Claude retrieves it.

Crawly also includes a crawl comparison feature that diffs two crawls side by side - essential for checking that a deploy did not break anything.

Best for: Mac users who want a complete crawl-based audit workflow. Download free or learn more about Crawly as a free SEO spider.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Windows/Mac, free up to 500 URLs)

Screaming Frog is the most widely used SEO spider software. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers small sites. Beyond that, the paid licence costs £199/year. It is Java-based, which means slower startup and higher memory usage than native apps, but the feature set is comprehensive.

Best for: Windows users and teams that need the industry-standard tool.

BeamUsUp (Windows, free)

BeamUsUp is a free Windows SEO crawler with no page cap. The interface is dated compared to modern tools but it is functional for core crawl tasks.

Best for: Windows users who need a free unlimited crawler.

Other free desktop crawlers worth considering: LibreCrawl (open source, cross-platform), SEO Tracer (Windows-based), and SEOnaut (self-hosted web app).

On-page analysis tools

Crawly SERP Preview

The SERP Preview tool shows how your title tag and meta description will render in Google search results, including pixel-width truncation. Useful for checking that titles do not get cut off.

Crawly Title Tag Checker

The Title Tag Checker validates a title tag's character count and estimated pixel width. Google truncates titles at approximately 600px, so this is more accurate than character counts alone.

Crawly Meta Description Checker

The Meta Description Checker checks the length and quality of a meta description and flags if it is likely to be truncated in search results.

Google Search Console (free)

Google Search Console is essential and free. It shows which queries drive impressions and clicks, which pages are indexed, what crawl errors Google has encountered, and how Core Web Vitals perform in the field. It is the primary source of truth for how Google sees your site.

Best for: Understanding actual search performance and Google's indexation status.

Link and redirect tools

Crawly Redirect Checker

The Redirect Checker traces the full redirect chain for any URL and shows each hop with its status code. Useful for identifying redirect chains and verifying that old URLs point correctly to new ones.

Crawly Canonical Tag Checker

The Canonical Checker fetches any URL and returns the canonical tag value, helping you verify that canonical directives are set correctly.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free)

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools offers free access to backlink data for sites you verify ownership of. You can see which external sites link to you, which pages have the most referring domains, and track new and lost links over time. The free tier is limited compared to paid Ahrefs but covers the essentials.

Best for: Monitoring backlinks to your own site.

Keyword research tools

Google Keyword Planner (free)

Google Keyword Planner is the original free keyword research tool. It requires a Google Ads account but does not require an active campaign. It shows search volume ranges and competition levels. The volume data is presented in wide ranges (1K-10K) rather than exact numbers, which makes it less precise than paid tools.

Google Search Console (free)

Search Console's Performance report is effectively a free keyword tool for your own site. It shows which queries you already rank for, click-through rates, and average position. For identifying low-hanging optimisation opportunities, it is more useful than any external keyword tool because it is real data from your actual site.

Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator (free, limited)

Ahrefs offers a free keyword generator that returns the top 10 keyword ideas for any seed term. Not a replacement for the paid tool, but useful for quick checks.

Technical SEO tools

Crawly hreflang Generator

The hreflang Generator builds correct hreflang tag sets for international pages. You specify the page URL, language, and region, and it outputs the correct tag markup to paste into your <head>.

Crawly Robots.txt Generator

The Robots.txt Generator builds a valid robots.txt file with rules for common crawlers. Useful for teams that do not want to write robots.txt syntax from scratch.

Google Rich Results Test (free)

Google's Rich Results Test validates structured data markup and shows which rich result types a page is eligible for. It is the authoritative tool for checking JSON-LD schema before pushing to production.

PageSpeed Insights (free)

PageSpeed Insights runs a Lighthouse audit against any URL and reports Core Web Vitals: LCP, CLS, and INP. It shows both lab data (simulated) and field data (real users via the Chrome UX Report). Essential for diagnosing performance issues that affect rankings.

Utilities

Crawly UTM Builder

The UTM Builder generates UTM-tagged URLs for campaign tracking. Set source, medium, campaign, and optional term and content parameters, and it outputs the tagged URL ready to use.

Crawly URL Slug Generator

The URL Slug Generator converts any text string into an SEO-friendly URL slug - lowercase, hyphenated, with special characters removed.

Building a free SEO toolkit

For most small to medium-sized teams, a complete free SEO toolkit looks like this:

| Task | Tool | |---|---| | Site crawl and audit | Crawly | | Search performance | Google Search Console | | Backlink monitoring | Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | | Page speed and Core Web Vitals | PageSpeed Insights | | Schema validation | Google Rich Results Test | | Individual page checks | Crawly's free tools |

Every tool in that list is free. Together they cover technical audits, content optimisation, link analysis, and performance monitoring. For a walkthrough of using these tools on a real site, see the free SEO website check guide.

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The best free SEO tools are the ones you actually use. Download Crawly and run your first site crawl today - no account, no page cap, no cost.